There are a lot of people who live around Heathrow who do not qualify for glazing but who suffer from aircraft noise. When I bought my house I got maps from the CAA showing the tracks around Heathrow and made sure the house was away from them. I also sought advice and was told the tracks were very unlikely to change. They did.
At the time the last flight out of Terminal 2 was Air France to Paris at 8pm, and the last flight out of Terminal 3 was not much later. You could sit in the garden on a summers evening, and once the PIA Classic had gone by it was pretty peaceful. Now the widebodies grind over our roof until well past 11 pm at night, and the noise of the first has barely faded away before the next one is overhead. If you shut the windows you still hear them, roast, and cannot sleep. if you open the windows you cannot sleep. It is not the absolute noise level that it the problem. It is that the noise is unremitting and intermittent.
Single issue lobby groups like Hacan are bound to take fairly extreme positions, because they attrat zealots. But then the aviation community is hardly a bastion of reasonable people, is it?
The problem I have with Heathrow is that it does not work:
- It is a shopping mall, not an airport
- It is noisy, dirty and polluted
- The infrastructure around it is collapsing
- It is far too small
It is self evident that, for all sorts of reasons, Heathrow cannot handle the traffic it currently sees, and that the surrounding infrastructure cannot cope with expansion even if the airport itself can. The only long term solution is to have London's main international airport elsewhere.